METANOMICS: CAN BEING PART MACHINE MAKE US MORE HUMAN?

DECEMBER   6, 2010

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ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Hi. I'm Robert Bloomfield, professor at Cornell University's

Johnson Graduate School of Management. Today we continue exploring Virtual Worlds in

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Metanomics is sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell

University. Welcome. This is Metanomics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome, everyone, to Metanomics. We've got a fascinating

show today. My working title for it is From Cyborg to Borg, for reasons that should soon

become obvious. Our guest is Michael Chorost, a science writer, former visiting professor at

Gallaudet University and author of Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me a Better

Human. He is also the author of the upcoming book World Wide Mind: The Coming

Integration of Humans and Machines. Mike, welcome to Metanomics.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Thank you, Rob, I'm glad to be here.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I gave a very abbreviated biography for you just then because I

felt like I couldn't do justice to your story. Tell us about how you came to write these books.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Sure. I was born deaf, in 1964, and I was not diagnosed as deaf

until three and a half, which is when I got hearing aids. So even with hearing aids, I was a

person who had to struggle to communicate. Hearing reshapes my world view. I wore

hearing aids until I was 36, and then I abruptly lost all my remaining hearing, in one day, in

July 2001. And, on that day I had two thoughts. My first thought was, "Well, I'll get a

cochlear implant." My second thought was, "I can probably write a book about the

experience I'm about to have."

So Rebuilt became that book. I literally wrote my way through the process of losing my

hearing and gaining it back again in an entirely new way. So Rebuilt is what I call a scientific

memoir, very much a story of my life, but it's also the story of a life bound up with machines,

specifically with computers. I was able to explore all sorts of fascinating topics in what

happens when you put a computer inside a person, what is that experience like.

That book came out back in 2005, and it gave me the opportunity to have conversations

with scientists and engineers all over the world about the future of technology, and that

planted the seed of my next book, which is coming out in February World Wide Mind. And

World Wide Mind is, in some ways, a sequel to Rebuilt. It picks up that personal story that I

told in Rebuilt and brings it to completion. And it also pushes forward that line of thought that

I started in Rebuilt: What is the future of the connection between humans and machines?

But I also asked the question: Where is the future of the connection between humans and

humans? How do we use technology to make us more human in an age where we are

saturated by interactions with screens? So I'll stop there, and I'll let you pick up some

questions from that point on, but I think that's the basic story of how I came to write these

books.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: That's great. I do want to spend most of our time on your new

book World Wide Mind, but first let me jump to the chase on Rebuilt. How did becoming part

computer make you a better human?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, that's a great question. First, I want to say that I wasn't saying

that getting the cochlear implant, or rather not having a cochlear implant makes you less

human. So I just wanted to make that clear. The intention of the title was that for me going

deaf was such a profound experience, and it caused me to reexamine a lot of my very basic

assumptions: what did I want to do with my life, how did I want to interact with people. In the

process of learning how to hear all over again was kind of symbolic for me of a quest of

learning how to connect with other people more richly and more deeply. In other words, I

wanted not just to hear better, I also wanted to connect better.

The experience of learning to hear again in a way gave me permission to pursue that quest

to learn how to communicate better. That's what the title means. It was about connecting

better with people. And, in the book, I talk a lot about my dating life, which was the most

painful part of my life up until then. I had always really struggled. My dating life abruptly got

a lot better once I allowed myself to start that process of trying to get used to this new body

that I lived in, to learn how to hear better, to rethink the way I communicate with people. And

it was such a profound learning experience that that's what I had decided to do in the book,

to try to take the reader through that process with me.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: At the very beginning there, when you talked about cochlear

implants, your first reaction seemed to be to make very clear that you weren't casting any

aspersions on people who choose not to and so on. I know this is really a hot-button issue in

the community. I came across a review of Rebuilt, by Stephen Chaikind, professor of

economics and finance at the Department of Business at Gallaudet University, where you

were there for one year as a visiting professor. I'd just like to read briefly from his review and

get your thoughts. He writes, "In reading this book, one can't help wonder if a world with

vastly improving cochlear implant technology is providing adequate information about other

choices available to deaf individuals, especially the options of learning ASL," that's

American Sign Language, "and joining the deaf community. Chorost does not mention

whether alternatives were discussed with him when he was investigating an implant. And

one wonders whether they're discussed in detail with parents seeking implants for their

children, an increasing percentage of whom are receiving implants at an early age and

some of whom we meet in this book."

He goes on to say that you yourself have adapted well to it, and yet, and here I'm quoting

his review, "There's still a note of sadness when he gives his impression of what the future

holds." And here he quotes from your book Rebuilt, "My joy then was mixed with longing

and sorrow. My own body is a battleground where competing visions of life are at war with

each other. On the one hand, life dominated by the hyper-rational structures of technology;

on the other, by the warmth of human community. In the vision that I had increasingly grown

to distrust was winning, for if a young, deaf child hears well enough with the cochlear

implant to learn spoken language, why learn ASL."

So could you elaborate a little bit on your views of the debate over cochlear implants?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Yes, certainly. That's an excellent question. And the first thing I want

to say is that I've come a long way since I wrote that back in 2004. It's now six years later,

and I've had the experience and living for a year at Gallaudet and being exposed much

more richly to American Sign Language. To me the question is not English versus ASL

because I think that certainly people can and should use both. I come from this viewpoint

now of linguistic diversity. So every language encodes a unique perspective on the world.

My concern is that, if ASL disappears, which I think is a possibility, what happens to that

perspective on the world as encoded by a uniquely visual language and uniquely physical

kind of language. So this concern is not just an issue with ASL. In fact, in the past, I don't

know, the past 20 years you have many hundreds of other languages have gone extinct. So

we are rapidly converging on almost monolingual kind of society, where just a few large

languages dominate the planet. You have basically English, Mandarin and a few other

languages. And niche languages all over the world are dying out. So this is not just a

problem with ASL.

What I do see, as in the quote that you've read, that ASL is uniquely about the body and is

uniquely about communication, uniquely about relationships, and I think that's an incredibly

important perspective that has to be retained. The question is how is that going to happen.

You take a look at the example of other minority languages, like Welsh and Hebrew, which

have been sustained and actually strengthened by these determined efforts to sustain those

languages by providing educational supports, by having government supports for the

language. Welsh and Hebrew are thriving languages nowadays.

One suggestion that I have made a number of times, as the book came out, is that the

signing-deaf community needs to undertake an effort like that. That it needs to figure out

where the pressure points in our society are that respond to that desire of minority

languages to continue, to figure out how to get funding, how to create educational

institutions, how to figure out how to just supply something to the world in the way that

Hebrew now does, for example, and I think that community has to figure that out. They can't

just assume that the language will continue because it always has continued. It is, in fact,

under assault.

It's not that anybody's trying to diminish it. It's just that every time parents decide to implant

their kid, they are putting the kid on an English-only track, for the most part. So I do see a

serious threat to the language. I think that the solution to that is ultimately political, to

articulate a case for the language and to carry through that case.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I guess everything I know about your activities are primarily

science writing and educational. Have you gotten politically involved in any of these issues?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. You're getting so soft, Rob, I'm having some difficulty hearing

you. Trying to click on your icon to increase your volume.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yes, that's exactly the way to go, and I can try to speak up as

well. Once you confirm that you can hear me well, I will ask that question again.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. I can hear you, but you're quite soft, but it's okay. I can hear

you.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. So the question was, I know of your activities in science

writing and education. Are you also politically active on issues regarding the deaf?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, I would not say that I am. I call myself a sympathetic observer

in the signing-deaf community rather than a participant in it. That was something that really

came home to me during my year at Gallaudet because, firstly, I found sign language

extremely difficult to learn so it was a real struggle for me that year. I took ASL I. I took

ASL II. I spent lots of time trying to communicate. It really came home to me that it would

take many more than just one year of practice to become a member of that community. The

linguistic barrier for me was very steep. So I remain a sympathetic outsider to the

signing-deaf community.

As for the oral-deaf community, I'm not really a member of that community either. I wouldn't

say that I'm politically active, but I certainly have given a number of speeches where I say

things that are very much like what I'm saying now, that it's important to retain ASL. But I

wouldn't say that I'm part of any kind of sustained political effort. No.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay, thank you. That's very interesting. I'd like to move on to

your new book World Wide Mind, and toward the beginning of that you talk about the

push-pull dynamic of technological innovation, and you write here, I'm quoting from the

book, "This is the way evolution works. Increases in complexity and power are not

accidental. They are automatic." What is the push-pull dynamic, and what is this automatic

process that you're referring to?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. This push-pull dynamic, let's give a very simple example, and

that's computers themselves. Every time computers get faster, that creates pressure to

design more capable software for them. Like Second Life, for example, which I can see is a

very computation-intensive kind of environment so that creates pressure to create even

faster computers. Engineers then buy even bigger applications. So you get this intense,

mutually enforcing drive to create better and better technologies. We see the dynamic all the

time in the technological world, but it's also very much an evolutionary force so it's the

eternal battle between predators and preying. Every time predators develop better method

of predation, prey invent better defenses and better methods of evasion, which lead

predators to become more capable, which lead prey to become more competent at evading.

And so again, you get this inexorable drive toward greater and greater complexity and

greater sophistication. The argument, as you say, it's not accidental when it's built into the

very nature of life itself. It's a fundamental, evolutionary aspect of life, and we see it both in

nature and in technology, which is a really crucial parallel because it suggests that these are

not distinct realms. We can't say there's nature on the one side and technology on the other,

that they are really part and parcel with the same evolutionary push toward greater and

greater complexity.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You write in World Wide Mind about the possibility of an

electronic corpus callosum that would, I guess as a result of this push-pull dynamic and this

inexorable improvement in technology, you say, "What if we built an electronic corpus

callosum to bind us together? What if we eliminated the interface problem, the slow

keyboards, the sore fingers, the tiny screen, the clumsiness of point and click by directly

linking the internet to the human brain? It would become seamlessly part of us, as natural

and simple to use as our own hands." And so this is really pushing the notion of Rebuilt, the

computer-human connection into the realm of the human-human connection using computer

technology as the medium.

And, to me, this really sounds a lot light Ray Kurzweil, who has famously written about the

increasingly rapid development of technology and the singularity. Now I admit I've never

quite understood what people mean when the talk about the singularity, other than that it's

some awesomely cool world in which cyborg technology rules, brains are uploaded into

computers, and people live forever. So my impression is, you're not quite the futurist that

Kurzweil is, but you're definitely a futurist. So maybe to use academic speech, Mike, could

you compare and contrast your views with Ray Kurzweil's?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Sure, I'd be happy to. You've picked the sentence in the book that

articulates the thesis of the book: What if the internet was as natural and simple to use as

our own hands? So let me just backtrack a little bit and just relate this a bit to my personal

history. Like every other cochlear-implant user, I'm a guy who has several hundred

thousand transistors in my head, and 32 electrodes. I have two cochlear implants so there's

32 electrodes altogether.

I myself have direct experience of the physical integration of computers with the human

body so I know that it works. I also know that it's not perfect, that there are issues with it. So

that is, I guess, what you might say is what authorizes me to write World Wide Mind

because I've got some of that bodily experience to begin with. I've read Kurzweil, and I've

been very inspired by him in a number of ways, but I also disagree with him in a number of

ways, so let me give you some of that compare and contrast.

Kurzweil, his whole idea of the singularity is basically that, at some point, computers are

going to achieve self-awareness and then become able to redesign themselves. Because

computers work so much faster than neurons, they'll be able to evolve far faster than

humans and leave all of us poor, organic humans in the dust while they go off and form this

elite, intensely intelligent society. So that's the idea of the singularity.

Now, to me, first of all, it's a fairly anti-human philosophy because it basically implies that

computers are going to become our betters and that humans will no longer be important or

necessary. I think there's a significant problem with that because it assumes that the body is

not really important for interacting with the world and assumes that all you really need is

silicon. But you look at how organic creatures evolved. They didn't do it just by thinking.

They did it by interacting intensely with their surroundings. They did it by creating

relationships with their fellow creatures. They evolved in an intense web and network of

relationships.

Those relationships were mediated by sight, by vision, by hearing, by touch, by language so

the body is so crucial to the way we interact with each other, but it's also so crucial to the

way species evolve. I think Kurzweil is making a mistake in essentially ignoring that process.

He's basically saying that the body isn't important, that it can be dispensed with. So World

Wide Mind tries to suggest an alternative kind of future where I say that, instead of leaving

the body behind, we can actually integrate the body with the internet so that when someone

interacts with us, instead of just seeing something on a screen, kind of like when I'm seeing

your avatar in Second Life or seeing text on a screen, I have some way of actually

perceiving what you're saying or how you're acting in some way that feels to me as a

meeting and real as if I'm actually experiencing it with my body.

There's only one way to do that, as far as I can see, and that is to physically integrate the

internet with the body in such a way that you can implant some kind of device into the

human that directly alters brain activity when you do something and allows you to perceive

my brain activity in your brain, in some way or another, when I interact with you. The

advantage of that is, it will allow us to interact at a distance just like we're interacting now in

Second Life, but in a much more visceral way, in a much more bodily kind of way.

So to put this argument in another way, there's all this angst being articulated now in books

like Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, which I haven't read--I've read enough reviews about it to

feel like I've read it--and, in a whole bunch of other books, like Jaron Lanier's book You Are

Not a Gadget, which all articulate this fear that the internet is alienating us from each other. I

think there's a lot of truth in that. For example, whenever I pick up my iPhone and start

dinking away at it, I'm not paying attention to other people. I'm not paying attention to the

world around me. And it goes the other way around. When I communicate with someone

face to face, I'm then isolated from the internet. I think it's interesting that a lot of people find

it almost intolerable. You see people who are so intensely attached to their iPhones, to their

BlackBerries, that they are riveted by these little things.

Right now these worlds are mutually exclusive, the world of computer communication and

the human life world, the physical face-to-face interactions. I think, as a society, we are

really struggling with that, and we're really suffering from all sorts of issues with that. This

computer distraction that people talk about, it impacts relationships, it impacts people's

experience of the world around them. People feel this hunger to look at their iPhones all the

time. My wife will sometimes comment that I spend a lot of time looking at iPhone.

So the suggestion that I try to articulate in World Wide Mind is, well, the solution to this is

not to say, well, we need to stop using our iPhones or our BlackBerries because that's not

going to happen. But rather, try to bring these two currently completely separate worlds

together so that there is a seamless link between the electronic world and the physical

world, and then that particular problem becomes less of an issue.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You actually have a great example in your book of the benefits of

that seamless link. Actually let me pick my pedestrian technology here. I have three-dollar

reading glasses from T.J.Maxx, and I'm going to put these on to read the hard copy of your

book I have. So this is World Wide Mind, and you're describing meeting a professor at

Gallaudet; you were taken to visit a math class, and you got her name on a handout. You

say, "I unholstered my BlackBerry, held it under the desk at an angle, called up Google and

stealthily typed her name into it. I scrolled down the results with a thumb wheel: Ph.D. in

statistics from Stanford, post-doc at McGill on analyzing FMRI data, progressive hearing

loss. And she was a science writer too. She had just done a story on hybrid cochlear

implants." And then you go on, "Now I knew her background, her history, her interests. It

gave her depth, dimension, a local habitation and a name. I looked at her, thinking, 'Wow! A

deaf science writer just like me.'"

And then this is the part I really like, you write, "Nosy, invasive, perhaps just a little, but I

was a visitor from the other side of the country. Knowing something about her would help

me smooth my way into a conversation. Anyway," and I have to say this is my favorite line in

the preface, "Anyway, I figured the day was coming when it would be considered rude not to

Google someone upon meeting them. One could discover mutual interests so much more

quickly that way." How far do you think we are from that day?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, I think we're getting a lot closer to it because I thing people do

Google each other on their iPhones and BlackBerries all the time. But it was a really neat

example of how the computer facilitated our meeting because, if I didn't know anything

about her, class was over, she had to run off to a class. My guy was going to whisk me off

somewhere else. It allowed us to start talking about what connected us much more quickly

than would have been possible otherwise. It was a great gift to be able to do that at that

time. So it was a really neat kind of example of that kind of thing.

Now, I think when a lot of people think about, well, what could you do if you physically

connect the people with the internet, and I think a lot of them would think, well, you can type

back and forth in each other's minds. And I say, well, no, not really. You can do that just fine

by talking or by using texting or whatever. So what I suggest is that new forms of interaction

would be fundamentally different from anything that we have now. This is how the history of

technology has always worked.

If you think back, for example, to the invention of printing, okay, so printing didn't just allow

people to do what scribes did, faster, it allowed for them to create an entirely new method of

communication, to create an author, to create something that speaks with authority of voice.

It includes ideas that are then rapidly broadcast through the entire population, which, all of a

sudden, had an impetus to become literate, where it didn't before.

You look at the telephone, which fundamentally changed the way people communicate.

People used the telephone to talk in ways that they don't talk in face to face. The same thing

with email. We do things with email that we never did with letters or telegrams before. So

the point I'm making is that technology doesn't just allow you to do all kinds of

communication better, it allows you to do new kinds of communication. So in the book World

Wide Mind, I try to go beyond, well, what would physical brain-to-brain communication let

you do. It wouldn't just let you text to each other.

And I say, "Well, what's missing today from electronic communication?" The big answer is

feelings. You don't know what someone else is feeling because you can't see their face, you

don't see their body language. You don't get that kind of information. So what I suggested is

that it might be possible to get that kind of information directly from the person's brain so

that you know, from their brain state, whether they are happy, whether they're sad, whether

they're attentive, whether they're not paying attention. You get that kind of information in a

way that is visceral. That would allow not just improvement on existing forms of

communication or really not even an improvement on existing forms of communications, but

entirely new kinds of communication.

I've adopted a word; it's not my invention, it's the word telempathy, the idea being that you

could use emerging technologies to feel what other people are feeling, not just read what

they are typing or hear what they are saying. That would allow entirely new kinds of

communication and new kinds of relationships to emerge. What I'm trying to do in that book

is to imagine a new kind of communication. So that story being told about me and Regina

[AUDIO GLITCH] at the beginning of the book was really just a launching point in saying,

"Well, my BlackBerry allowed me to start a conversation with her in a way I really couldn't

have before." I used it as a launching point to say, "How much further could this go?"

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: As you set up in your book, as you explained to the reader what

you're going to be talking about, you begin by comparing what you are trying to do to

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, and you write, "Because it was grounded in real

science, Verne's novel was conceptually plausible, in the same way recent advances in

neuroscience and neurotechnology make it possible to write a conceptually plausible

account of how brains could be read and linked [AUDIO GLITCH] experiment." And so I

thought I'd ask you to walk us through that thought experiment, and I'd like to start with the

first section of the book. As you describe it, you say, "It discusses existing technologies for

detecting brain activity and the algorithms used to interpret the resulting data." So you're not

just a futurist, you're grounding this in what's happening now. Tell us a little about that. What

is available right now in technology?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Well, you've landed on a really important distinction that I make in

that first chapter, that the book is a thought experiment. I've not made the claim in the book

that mind-to-mind communication or telempathy or however you describe it is plausible now.

What I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to show that it's become possible to talk about it in a

concrete way that was not possible before. Really, if you look back on science fiction,

people have been creating fantasies for decades, probably even hundreds of years, about

this kind of mind-to-mind communication. You see it in Star Trek's Borg, for example, and, in

that certain Star Trek, it's just a pure fantasy. Star Trek has no idea how this kind of

communication could actually happen, has no idea how you could actually make one human

aware of what 10,000 other humans are doing at any particular instant. So it's just fantasy.

What I do in the book is, I say it is now becoming possible to take this out of the realm of

fantasy and talk about it in terms of technologies that actually exist now and which have just

come into existence actually, particularly optogenetics. I know you're planning to ask me

about that late so I won't get into that right now. But there are new neuroscience

technologies that make it possible to observe brain activity with an unprecedented level of

detail, and they make it thinkable to isolate an individual thought in a human mind. And they

make it thinkable to evoke a similar thought in someone else's mind. Now, up until about five

years ago, that's been pure fantasy. There's been no imaginable engineering path to making

such a thing happen.

What I try to do in the book is, I say we are now beginning to be able to imagine that kind of

engineering path, and so in Chapter Eight in the book, I lay out that path in some detail. I

don't claim that I have answers to all the questions. I don't claim that I can tell you exactly

how it would be done. The only claim that I make is that it's beginning to become possible to

talk concretely about it. So that's why I brought up the Jules Verne reference.

Jules Verne he wrote the book From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, which was just about

one hundred years before it actually happened. And Verne imagined launching astronauts

to the moon by firing a spaceship out of a giant cannon. Okay? This huge cannon called the

Columbiad, which you would pack a ton of gunpowder in it, stick the capsule in it, light the

cannon, and it would shoot the capsule out of the atmosphere toward the moon. Of course,

if we actually did that, the astronauts would be pulps. Okay? So that wouldn't work, but

Verne got the math right. He correctly showed how long it would take such a spaceship to

get to the moon. He gave the actual figures for how fast such a spaceship would have to go

to get out of the earth's gravitational field to reach the moon. He correctly calculated how

long it would take.

So Verne didn't have the all the technological tools at hand, but he got the basic idea. He

said, "If you can part enough velocity to a projectile, you can make it reach the moon, with

people inside." So that's kind of what I'm trying to do in World Wide Mind. I'm trying to bring

it into that realm of conceptual possibility, just as, in 1865, Jules Verne brought going to the

moon into that realm of conceptual possibility. I found that really just enormously exciting,

just the fact that I could begin to say we can begin to talk about this. Using actual numbers,

using actual technologies is really just such an exciting experience to be able to do that kind

of thing.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Let's jump into those technologies and start with, as you

mentioned, the existing technologies for detecting brain activity and algorithms used to

interpret the resulting data. What are you referring to?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. I start by talking about functional MRI. So MRI, Magnetic

Resonance Imaging. To use it, you have to stick the person inside this enormous magnet

that's the size of a walk-in closet. The machine costs a couple million dollars. Big, huge

technology. It's in just about every hospital in the western world these days. You can use the

MRI machine to watch which parts of the brain are sucking up oxygen in any particular

instant. You can ask a person to engage in some mental activity, say, deciding whether to

add or to subtract a particular set of numbers. You can see that when the brain's decides to

add, you get a certain pattern of oxygen consumption in a part of the brain. And when the

brain decides instead to subtract those numbers, you get a different pattern of oxygen

consumption in a certain part of the brain.

So it is now actually possible to stick someone into a functional MRI machine and to be able

to tell whether they've chosen to add or to subtract two numbers. You can do this without

asking them what their decision is. You can do it without looking in their face. You can do it

just by looking at imagering of what's going on inside their brain. So in a very real sense, we

have mind-reading machines. Now I haste to say that these technologies are very limited.

For one thing, you can only know what a brain is thinking if you have already seen that

activity before. In other words, you only know whether a brain has decided to add or

subtract if you have repeatedly asked it to make that thought over and over and figure it out

where a pattern activity corresponds to that mental intention. So you can't know if that

person has decided to multiply, unless you've identified that particular pattern of oxygen

consumption before.

I use that example to say today we actually do have mind-reading machines. They're just

extremely crude. The technology at this point is very limited, but they do exist. If you have a

couple million dollars and a lot of software and all sorts of technicians, you can tell whether

someone is making that kind of decision. You can tell whether they're seeing

George Clooney's face as opposed to Jennifer Anniston's face. You can actually take it

further. You can, in some cases, know which face they're looking at out of a given set of

faces. So we really do have the ability at this point to read minds, in some sense.

But I make it very clear, that's really limited. There's not a lot you can do with that. So I

asked the question, "Well, are there emerging technologies that would let you go further?"

And the answer seems to be, to some extent, yes. So I start with a technology called

nanowires, which is a very experimental kind of technology. It's certainly not used in people.

But it's possible, in principle, to thread very tiny wires into the brain's capillaries, going

through the bloodstream, almost like you're doing an angiogram, except that you're going to

the brain rather than the heart.

You can snake these tiny, little wires so that each little wire ends up in a different part of the

brain, and those wires will then relay information about what a few neurons in that part of

the brain are doing, whether they are firing or not. So in principle, you could put several

hundred or several thousand of these tiny wires into a brain, and that would give you much

more finely-grained information about what neurons in the brain are doing, and that gives

you more predictive power if you have the right algorithms. Because functional MRI is a very

crude technology. It only tells you what thousands or tens of thousands or millions of

neurons are doing. It doesn't let you see what, say, ten or fifteen neurons are doing. It

doesn't allow you to focus on the neuromachinery that corresponds to one particular

thought. It doesn't allow you to zoom in like that. So technology, like nanowires, begins to

allow us to think about zooming in on particular parts of specific neural circuits.

I bring up nanowires just to say it is becoming thinkable to do this, but then I point out that

nanowires too have major limitations. It's very difficult to figure out just mechanically how

you would push several hundred or several thousand wires into a brain, get them all into

different capillaries. So it's a scaffolding technology for me. I bring it up just to show the

reader that you can begin to think about this kind of thing.

Then I move on to optogenetics, which is much more advanced and much more exciting

technology. I talk about it at length in Chapter Eight in the book, but I'll just give you the

overview here. Basically you can genetically modify neurons to make them responsive to

light. In other words, you could put genes into them that will make them fire when you shine

a light of a certain wavelength at them. And you can put other genes that will make them

stop firing when you shine light of a different wavelength at them. Now, I'd been thinking,

"Well, what do you mean shine the light on the brain? It's inside this sealed container. How

do you get light in there?"

Well, one way, which is actually done now is, you just pipe it through the skull with

fiber-optic cables, and this is being done in animal experiments now. So people are putting

genes into the brains of mice and other animals, genetically modifying those neurons so

they can control the firing or inhibit the firing of specific neurons with specific wavelengths of

light. So this technology's allowing for a tremendous degree of control over what certain

neurons do, and it can also be used to observe what certain neurons do. I go into some

detail about the molecular biology of how to do that.

So I say, well, optogenetics allows us, in principle, to do these kinds of things. If you can get

that much information out of the brain, it becomes possible to think about writing algorithms

that will correlate brain activity with, I guess you might say, more sophisticated states of

mind rather than just choosing add or subtract or just seeing one face versus another face,

to allow us to get some insight into the conscious activity of a mind. Now, there's all sorts of

issues that that statement opens up, but I'll just stop at that point, and let's go on to the next

question and see where you want to take this conversation.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: What you've talked about is essentially accessing data from the

brain, but I know in your book you move from there to what you call a communications

protocol that allows that information to be transmitted eventually from brain to brain. I guess

here now we are beyond existing technology, and you're sketching out a possible direction

for this work. So what is it that you see that a communications protocol would do, and how

would it have to be structured?

MICHAEL CHOROST: Okay. I'll be completely frank in saying that answering this question

leads me to the weakest point in the book, and I'm frank about it in the book as well. I'm

sure a lot of people out there in the audience know this very old cartoon by Sidney Harris,

where it shows this mathematician writing this equation on a blackboard, and, in the middle

of this equation is this part, "And then a miracle happens," and then the equation continues

to the answer. Okay? So there is a point in the book where I basically do that, where I just

say, "Okay. Well, at this point I think we have to assume some miracle happening, and then

we can get to where we're going." I want to talk about what that miracle is.

We already know from functional MRI that we can know what a brain is doing if we have

already seen that brain's activity before. But we also know that that's a very limited kind of

information. In order to actually know what a brain is thinking, I think it's very difficult at this

particular time to imagine an algorithm is sophisticated enough to look at a brain's activity

and know the conscious experience of that brain. I don't think there is any algorithm that

exists that can do that.

So what I basically say is, you would have to develop some form of artificial intelligence, and

this is a part of the book where I do come into closer alignment with Kurzweil. I say that, if at

some point you could develop algorithms that have some sense of interiority, they're able to

look at a brain and observe a person's behavior and start building up a set of correlations,

say, where the algorithm learns to say, "When the brain does this, the person does that.

When the brain does that, the person does this." And if it could build up a large enough

database, eventually algorithm learns to figure out that when this bunch of neurons fires,

you're thinking about apples. Okay. And when that bunch of neurons fire, you're feeling

unhappy. And when this bunch of neurons fire, you're thinking about your significant other.

This is the part of the book where I just say we can't do this now, but, if that kind of algorithm

ever does become possible, then we would be able to build devices which would implement

a communication protocol between brains. Let me talk about what the protocol would be.

Think for a minute about the way the idea of an apple is represented in your neurons versus

the way it's represented in my neurons. Now we know that, on a gross level, brains are

roughly the same. You've got hippocampus. I've got a hippocampus. You've got a medulla.

I've got a medulla. You've got a forebrain. I've got a forebrain. So on a gross level, our

brains are pretty much the same, but it's pretty clear that on the individual neuro level, the

way your brain represents an apple is not going to be the same way my brain represents an

apple. There is no mapping at that level between brains. There is no single set of neurons in

your brain that corresponds to an identical set of neurons in my brain. The similarity

between brains just doesn't go that far.

So the suggestion that I articulate in the book is that, if your onboard computer or whatever

you've got knows when your brain is thinking of an apple, it can then just send one simple

piece of information to my onboard computer just the word apple. Then my computer knows

which neurons in my brain, when fired, make me think about or experience an apple in

some way and can then fire those neurons to make me think, in some sense, of an apple.

So that's what I mean by communications protocol. This is the part where I just deliberately

say, "Yeah, you've got to have algorithms that can do that kind of thing. If you don't, then

this kind of thing will never be possible. But, if it is possible, if it ever becomes possible, this

kind of protocol becomes thinkable.

Now, you might be asking yourselves, "Well, what good is that really? You don't really need

to set up this elaborate technology to let me know that you're thinking about or seeing an

apple. All you need to do is say to me the word apple." That's the point where I say, "Well,

the point is not that you use the technology to do things that we do already, with our existing

modes of communication." You use it to allow people to do new things, to allow me to know,

in some visceral sense, what you're actually seeing and what you're actually feeling, to, in

some degree, read information off your visual cortex and make my visual cortex do

something similar.

If you are seeing a particular person walking towards you, then it may be possible to evoke

equivalent activity in my visual cortex to make me perceive something similar, assuming that

we both know that person and that we both have a set of neurons in our heads that

represents in some way the activity of something coming closer to us. And we do know that

the visual cortex encodes light and shadow and motion and shape, in certain very

distinctively identifiable ways, in various layers of the visual cortex. And those are, in

principle, identifiable. And, with optogenetics, they are, in principle, sharable.

So the overall point that I drive at is not that this be a perfect communications method by

any means. But I say that language is not perfect either. When you tell me a story, it does

not make me see the exact, same scene that you see when you tell that story. So if you tell

the story of seeing a dog in your neighborhood in Brooklyn or wherever you live, I don't see

the same neighborhood that you see. I don't see the same dog that you see, but I substitute

my own memories of Brooklyn neighborhoods, of dogs, and I see an acceptable analog in

my mind of what you're telling me about--let me explain--feel like I'm seeing when you are

communicating to me. This would essentially allow a new kind of language, if you were to

tell me stories and to convey feelings and impressions to me in a new kind of way, which

really is not possible now. So I try to imagine that kind of possibility in the book.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You actually talk about specific examples of the kinds of

collective communication, basically new activities people might engage in, as you said,

beyond just doing what we already do just differently. These are words that I'm hoping you

can explain to us: telempathy, which you mentioned earlier; synthetic perception; synthetic

memory; and one that I thought sounded very tantalizing: dream brainstorming.

MICHAEL CHOROST: One of the hardest parts of the book was just trying to imagine what

you could do with this kind of technology. It was like trying to imagine what you could do

with email before email existed. Again, that's very hard to do because you just don't have

the cultural, mental hardware to do it. But I try. I give it a shot. When you connect a

computer to a network, you don't just connect it to one other computer, you connect it to all

of the others computers in the network. You allow that computer to get aggregated

information from many, many other computers in the network. So you allow for the collection

of many bits of data to be brought together to bring useful information to one computer in

somewhat the same sense that I can create a Twitter feed that tells me what everybody is

saying, that one particular topic on a particular day, like the Twitter feed Metanomics. Okay?

The thing I imagine is this: We already know that you can walk into a room and get a sense

of the mood of that room. You can tell like people excited, are they bored, are they happy,

are they busy, are they quiet, what's going on in that room. So we already have an

advanced biological technology for gathering that kind of information. Every teacher knows

that classes have moods, every course is different because of the unique interactions of

people with each other. But today we only get that information when we are face to face with

a group of people. So the whole point of networking dreams together would be to allow

people to get that kind of information from people that they don't see, from people that they

can see, to be able to get a sense of the moods of a distributive group, an entire country, a

town, a group of people.

I offer a number of scenarios in the book where I just make this concrete, like I imagine a

military team working together to do a drug bust basically, where people on the team need

to know where everyone else is and what they are actually feeling so that you know if

anybody's been injured just by getting a sense of what kind of pain sensations their brain is

getting. That is what I try to do to imagine that kind of--to use these words--telempathy,

synthetic perception, dream brainstorming.

So synthetic perception--I actually talked about it. I didn't use the phrase, but I talked about

it. It is where you evoke activity in someone's visual cortex to get them a synthetic analog of

what another brain is seeing. So by the same token, you can aggregate information

together, to give people a synthesized piece of information about the moods or the actions

of anything from a small work group to a nation of many millions of people, in some concrete

kind of way.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: As we continue our progression toward more and more unusual

outcomes here, the last one that you promise us in the book is an account of how a

collective mind might emerge out of these interactions. You refer to it as possibly a hive

mind. I'll just go back to my original reference at the top of the show, to Star Trek's Borg, this

one hive mind all working together. One of the goals of writing a book like this and trying to

ground it in, as you've called it, a thought experiment is to place some structure on these

science fiction notions. I'm hoping that you can tell us what you mean by a hive mind and, in

particular, how all of this analysis that you use to get us there sort of draws a sharper picture

of what it is that you're talking about when you talk about it.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Sure. Let me just check on something because I notice that it's 3:57.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. We only have a few.

MICHAEL CHOROST: So for me to answer the question, this will take a lot longer than

three minutes. What's our timeframe here?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: We have about three minutes so you'll have to do what you can.

I'm just giving you practice for when you get on broadcast TV, and they give you three

minutes to talk about the whole book. So I'm being gentle.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Sure. Okay. Basically, there is an analogy that science fiction

movies make all the time, where the internet becomes "intelligent." I'm making air quotes

with my fingers as I say that so your avateer(?) can represent that. So like in Terminator,

Skynet becomes intelligent and it decides to wipe out the inconvenient human species. So

the question that I ask in the book is, "Could that happen?" And my answer is, if you just

looking at the internet, the answer is absolutely not because the internet, in and of itself,

doesn't have an evolutionary imperative to go in that direction. It's just a collection of

resources. It's just a bunch of computers and a communications protocol. So I just say that's

just a big mistake. The internet itself has no reason to become intelligent.

But I do say that when you add human activity into the picture, when you connect you and

the computers together, the entire picture changes because human beings do have

evolutionary needs, and they do respond to evolutionary imperatives. And, if you physically

connect them, then all of a sudden you have an organism that is physically a single,

continuous organism of the internet and human brains that will respond to evolutionary

pressures and needs, to threats, to mobilize, take advantage of opportunities. I try to

suggest how a cautiousness can emerge out of that.

Now, I don't go far as to say that you would get a consciousness because I think this is one

of the big questions that nobody's really succeeded in answering. Kurzweil doesn't answer

it. He never explains, so far as I can see, how you get a self-aware entity out of accelerating

numbers of computers and increased numbers of [nodes?] on the internet. He keeps saying

that it will happen. He never explains how it will happen. So the piece that I try to add to this

discussion is, you can't just think about computers in and of themselves. You also need to

think about the combination of humans and computers. In other words, the sociology of

humans and the internet. And it's in looking at that that you begin to get some glimmers as

to how a collective consciousness could arise, which is more intelligent than any individual

human.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. That's very interesting and brings us right up to the top of

the hour. So I would like to thank you for joining us, Michael Chorost, who is the author first

from Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me A better Human and now the

upcoming book World Wide Mind. I think I just said "part computer made me a better

computer." So Part Computer Made Me a Better Human. And author of the upcoming book

World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans and Machines. It's been a fascinating

discussion, Mike, and I wish you the best of luck on your publication and sales.

MICHAEL CHOROST: Thank you so much. You've been a great host. I really appreciate it.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Okay. We will be back next week for what is probably our

season-closing episode, before the holidays, of Metanomics, metanomics.net. You can see

us on Facebook and on the web and, of course, in Second Life. So thanks, everyone, and

see you next week. Bye bye.

Document: cor1097.docTranscribed by: http://www.hiredhand.com